Facebook Friend Activity Seen Around the World

Palantir, by Jack Lindamood, Kevin Der, and Dan Weatherford of Facebook, visualizes friend activity on Facebook. The three “hacked” together Palantir at Facebook’s recent Hackathon, but I’d never guess that it was put together in just one night by looking at it. There are a few different views. One shows activity in the form of towers sprouting up from the ground and another visualizes interactions between Facebook friends with floating arcs and things that look like orbiting comets. The former reminds me of a visualization some Google folks did a while back but with search terms. I can’t find a link to it now though (a little help, please?).

It’s kind of sad how people are getting excited about this. Tamara Munzner’s Internet backbone visualization from 1996 did pretty much the same thing, and without half a billion in startup funding.

The visualization is also not very informative: all we’re seeing is that there’s activity in the US and in Europe, and practically nowhere else. A map of those two places would have been a lot more useful (because it would be possible to tell where those dots are actually hovering) but of course less flashy and it would be harder to pretend that there were Facebook users around the world.

It’s a shame that most people only appreciate visualization when it’s pretty and flashy, and never realize that there are ways to show things visually that are actually useful.

I don’t think it’s the visualization itself why it’s getting so much attention – at least that’s not what first drew me in. It was the simple fact that it was made by engineers at Facebook during a Facebook event. Same goes for visualization by Google. When these big companies make something, people take notice.

It’s like when The New York Times gets a bunch of attention for an infographic that applies some new technique designed at the past InfoVis. Big names – big attention.